[renox]

You have good points but "the syntax is hard to manipulate programmatically"??

Maybe you haven't noticed but Lisp is now a tiny niche and most new languages aren't homoiconic either..

[pharmakom]

I don't think that proves anything. If we had "JavaLisp" in the browser instead of JavaScript then Lisp would be very popular. Besides that, Python is harder to manipulate than many non-Lisps, such as JavaScript and Go.

[renox]

Python became popular without being the 'web language', the Lisps didn't.

[pharmakom]

Curly brace languages are more popular again.

[kazinator]

Here, we can set Lisp aside and take grandparent comment's definition of syntax to be concrete, character-level syntax.

Python concrete syntax is harder to manipulate programmatically compared to Javascript concrete syntax.

For instance, to insert one statement into another, we need to traverse the lines of that syntax and add the right amount of indentation. We can't just plant the syntax into the desired spot and be done with it.